Evolution always wins.

Reserve Constable Albert Alexander was a plant lover. That day he got a minor scratch on his face by a thorn while tending to the rose bush in his garden.

By the end of the month, the scratch was badly infected with both Staphylococcus and Streptococcus and Constable Alexander was hospitalised in the Radcliffe Infirmary. Alexander’s head was oozing pus and one of his eyes had to be removed.

It was December of 1940.

Penicillin was still 2 months away. In those days if you get infected, the best treatment was to cut that part and throw away before the infection could spread to other parts.
Those were the days if you get a minor injury, only your luck decided whether you would survive or die. People didn’t suffer from cancer or heart diseases in those days because they never outlived infection due to an injury by an animal or tuberculosis or plague.
Dr Howard Florey has tried this new thing penicillin on mice and He needed a patient who was in a terminal condition to experiment; Constable Alexander suited this requirement.

On 12 February 1941, Constable Alexander was given an intravenous infusion of 160 mg (200 units) of penicillin. Within 24 hours, Alexander’s temperature had dropped, his appetite had returned and the infection had begun to heal. However, Florey’s laboratory had extracted only a small quantity of penicillin for the experiment. By the fifth day they had run out of their stock of penicillin.

Constable Alexander died on 15 March 1941.

Another few years we will run out of our stock of antibiotics due to drug resistance. Majority of bacteria today are resistant to 98 of the 100 odd antibiotics that we have in our armoury.

You see, bacteria take only 20 minutes to evolve. We need 10 years to develop a new drug. No wonder Bacteria have an unfair advantage over our pharmacy. And so our pharma companies are not making antibiotics anymore. Their huge cost of R&D to develop a new one is not worth even one year.

So soon every one of us from president of USA to you and me will be in the unenviable position of Albert Alexander, dying due to simple injuries because the infection couldn’t be controlled.

Penicillin ushered in the antibiotic era in 1941. We have run out of them hardly in 75 years. Soon a scratch of rose thorn may be deadly. Yet our road injuries are growing geometrically.

Evolution always wins, like it has against the huge Dinosaurs.